The Internet has become an indispensable part of our daily lives. Everyday, millions of people use the Internet to read news, shop on-line, search for information, and chat with others, etc. Recently, with the increased availability of high-speed connections to the Internet, the Internet is also becoming a major means of communications, supplementing and perhaps someday surpassing the capacities of conventional public telephone systems and satellite transmissions. Computer software and hardware are now well developed and readily available for users to hold video conferences over the Internet. For instance, a video camera with a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection can be had for only tens of dollars, and some current operating systems, such as the Windows operating systems of Microsoft Corporation, provide a rich set of functions for supporting Internet video conferencing.
In the meantime, the number of home networks has been growing rapidly. The prices of personal computers and networking devices have fallen tremendously, and it is very easy for a user with multiple computers at home to set up a home network. As a result, computer networking is no longer limited to business/work places and has entered many homes. The availability of home networking has opened many possibilities of home automation. Such possibilities, however, are mostly unrealized at this time. Many users implement home networks mainly for the purpose of being able to access the Internet from different computers in the home and to share data and programs among the home computers, and the aspect of information data access is largely independent of and unrelated to other aspects of home activities and functions. For instance, watching television is a major form of home entertainment. If a user watching television in the living room wants to conduct an Internet video conference, she has to go to her study room where her personal computer is located, sit down in front of the video camera mounted on her personal computer, and use the computer to do the video conferencing.